South Korean army soldiers pass by a TV screen showing the live broadcast of South Korean President Park Geun-hye's speech, at the Seoul Railway Station in Seoul, South Korea, Tuesday, Feb. 16, 2016. (Ahn Young-joon)

(Newser)
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South Korea's president warned Tuesday that rival North Korea faces collapse if it doesn't abandon its nuclear bomb program, an unusually strong broadside that will likely infuriate Pyongyang. President Park Geun-hye, in a nationally televised parliamentary address, said South Korea will take unspecified "stronger and more effective" measures to make North Korea realize its nuclear ambitions will result only in speeding up of its "regime collapse." The speech was meant to defend Park's decision last week to shut down the Koreas' last major cooperation project, a jointly run factory park in the North Korean border city of Kaesong.

Park and her deputies maintain that South Korean payments to workers at Kaesong have gone in large part straight to the leaders who oversee North Korea's nuclear bomb and missile programs, reports the AP, which notes that the brusque tone of Park's comments directly challenge the powerful, ubiquitous North Korean propaganda machine's portrayal of the dictators who have run the country since its founding in 1948 as infallible. Any high-level talk of regime collapse by the conservative president of rival South Korea—and by the daughter of one of the North's most hated enemies, late South Korean dictator Park Chung-hee—amounts to fighting words. (Activists are trying to change the lives of North Koreans with old flash drives loaded with Western TV shows.)

So, the North Koreans are told the Southern leaders are doing the nasty stuff...and they see images of a woman president? The North Koreans can't even rattle on without tipping their hand that there are differences across the border.....

Jerman

Feb 16, 2016 9:34 AM CST

DPRK is the most dangerous country on earth right now as they are willing to use their few nuclear weapons and the world kowtows to them with all sorts of food aid to keep their regime going. The South is finally realizing they have been supporting them out of fear of the North. Even China now recognizes North Korea as a nuclear weapon threat.

Chris Farley

Feb 16, 2016 7:13 AM CST

The south says the North is all propaganda (it is), but the south pushes propaganda and does these "propaganda, made to infuriate" practices, only because they are standing behind 28K US troops and our military hardware...